Currently there is a trend towards the use of alternative forms of medicine. However, at best these methods are ineffective, and at worst they may be dangerous.To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Essay topic:

Currently there is a trend towards the use of alternative forms of medicine. However, at best these methods are ineffective, and at worst they may be dangerous.To what extent do you agree with this statement?

In the past couple of decades, medical science has scaled new heights. However there are still people who follow alternate medical practices. In my opinion, these side-stream therapies are useless and in many cases they prove to be harmful.

To begin with, these therapies use unreliable and sometimes confusing raw material for preparing medicines. In many cases, these compounds have soothing effect but do very little to treat the actual problem. For instance, most of the homeopathic syrups contain high concentration of alcohol. The amount of alcohol is as high as 40% which gives an immediate anesthetic effect to internal organs. This gives false sense of healing, however does nothing to counter the root cause.

Moreover, these practices are based on untested primitive methods. In modern medical science, every new finding is tested on thousands of specimen before getting to public use. On the other hand, these alternate techniques use unpublished, half baked hypothesis that cause more harm than good. Most of their research is done on actual patients, putting their lives at risk.

Finally, there is no or very little documentation available for these substitute treatments. These skills are passed on from one generation to another within a handful of families with no validation done by any independent authority. There is no prescriptive guideline to be followed. Whatever little content is available, its open to interpretation and provide no rigid specifications. This makes it very easy for a practitioner to get it wrong and still get away with it.

To sum up, i would like to conclude that these alternate forms of treatments are ungoverned and dangerous and hence should be avoided.